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Dear Seagoat #12: (Why) A Gemini Is A Gemini Is A Gemini…(or When Your Sun Sign Doesn’t Seem To Fit)

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Dear Seagoat,

I am confused because I do not seem like what I read about Gemini. I am introverted, live in the woods, don’t go out much. Except for curiosity – I am very curious, almost indiscriminately so. Then I get confused by all I’ve learned. I have to come home to the woods and spend days figuring out what I believe, what I know. Can you help me understand this?

Gemini Or Not Gemini?

Dearest, finest, woodland-loving GONG,

Here’s what I’m imagining you’ve read about Geminis: Outgoing, happy chatterboxes with lifestyle ADD. Depending on the snarkiness of your sources, “two-faced” and “shallow” may have come up. No doubt you’ve also been cornered at a Christmas party by someone saying, “Oh, my god you’re a GEMINI??? You guys are CRAZY!” (If this hasn’t yet happened to you at a Christmas party, you do need to get out more.) The fact is, I think most people feel like you do about their purported Sun sign traits.

My friend, Lauren, who spends a lot of time on the internet, keeps telling me how popular astrology is “these days”.

I can’t tell if she’s right, or if I just keep migrating to progressively more New Age cities. In any case, I do notice that normal-looking, professionally successful people (spilling their cappuccinos on nicer clothing than I have ever owned) suddenly want to talk about planets and signs. (This is a lie. I am the one spilling my cappuccino.) (This is also a lie. I can’t actually afford cappuccino. Even if I could, I wouldn’t let the stuff pass my lips because I’m too New Age for caffeine.)

One side effect of this is a lot of astro-garbage flowing through the digital and IRL gutters, hiding out in the corner of keg parties, picking its nose in the ladies room of upscale eateries.

I will give you an example: Mercury Retrograde. People freak the fuck out about Mercury Retrograde. Google reveals wall-to-wall collective irrationalia—and the clickbait that panders to it. As a result, this month my FB feed is full of dear, lovely, otherwise intelligent people worrying their airplanes will drop from the sky, their life savings will disappear from the bank, their house will spring holes and sink into the ocean. While 10 weeks of the year Mercury Retro can produce pain and strife (e.g. the kind of customer service interactions that make sales clerks worldwide want to smash their heads through walls), it’s not pain and strife worth posting to Yahoo! Answers about. (Unless your greatest phobia is having to repeat yourself. In which case, I hope you’re spending this October hiding under the bed with your jaw wired shut and all your social media-ready devices wrapped in tinfoil.)

Am I taking a minute getting to the point? Perhaps that is because I’m channeling the curious (and distractible) spirit of the Gemini sign, a quality Gemini transmits to any planet that falls (by birth time) into its sphere of influence. Curiosity is an oversimplification, though. What Gemini fundamentally signifies is the impulse to look at an idea from all possible directions. That impulse can be exhausting—for the friends and loved ones of a Geminian individual—but also for each one of that individual’s insatiable Gemini planets. As a result, most Geminis do need a break from time-to-time—which is one place their famous duality shows up.

You, GONG, are in fact what I call a “super Gemini”, meaning you have a zillion planets in Gemini*, only one of which is your Sun. You play out that Gemini insatiability in so many different ways that in addition to tiring yourself out, you probably experience the lesser known (but common) side-effects of Geminian mental energy: paralyzing indecision and anxiety.

And whence goes indecision and anxiety, goeth coping mechanisms.

Depending on a Gemini Sun person’s birth chart, those coping mechanisms might come out as partying, novel writing, over-talking, cruising/hooking up, whatever. It just depends on what’s in the rest of your chart. Most of the Geminis in my life (a highly nonscientific sample) look from the outside like a ping pong ball bouncing between a public, lighthearted social side (getting out, meeting people) and a private, moodier or more pensive side (getting away from everything to read, write and think). I don’t think many of my Gemini friends would name themselves as extroverts, though from my sober-minded Capricorn perspective they might appear that way.

In your case, that mega Gemini planet cluster lives in the 9th house of your birth chart. The houses, less famous but arguably more important than the signs, reveal in what area of life planets prefer to express themselves. Among other things, the 9th house rules deep study and the search for meaning, as well as the need to get away—to be free and independent—to pursue those goals. Makes a lot of sense that you’d want to head out to the woods to process what you sucked up in your Gemini question vacuum; how better to comb through raw data and distill its deeper meaning, its more important Message, than to be by yourself in nature?

Still, GONG, this question is proof you’re a Gemini to the bone. Everyone else writes me because they’re going through a breakup or want to meet a cute grrl. You? You just want to know.